I came into the Cafe today just in time to watch a long
and
messy fsck over somebody's shoulder. I should have asked
what
they did to freeze the computer up, but I didn't want to
seem
nosy and annoy the person, so I walked around the room and
talked to a few people for a while, until I noticed the
individual in question getting up and leaving the Cafe in
frustration. I rushed over to the computer to find it in a
near-catatonic state -- not completely unresponsive, but
very
nearly so. Ctl-Alt-F-whatever took a while to clear the
screen,
but very soon I was able to type "ps aux" to find dozens of
Netscapes, dozens of Mozillas, and at least five Galeons
rampaging around the CPU. I rebooted after using "killall
-12" on all the browsers. In retrospect, I could have simply
killed X with a Ctl-Alt-Backspace (or Delete, or whatever.)
That
would have been a carpal tunnel saver, though inelegant.

Ultimately, when we are done installing apps and configuring
the desktop, we are going to make all disk partitions but
one read-only, like Jamie Zawinski recommended.